Tim Cook brought uncles and aunts into the limelight

Published 3:44 pm, Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged he is gay — and also “an engineer, an uncle” — giving childless adults a new celebrity status.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged he is gay — and also “an engineer, an uncle” — giving childless adults a new celebrity status.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Tim Cook brought uncles and aunts into the limelight

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Like millions of people, I was deeply touched by Apple CEO Tim Cook’s article in Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday. Bravo to him for officially coming out when he was ready to and for doing it in such a thoughtful, measured way.

But what affected me the most in his article probably blurred by other people. It was buried in his list of things he is besides being gay: “an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic.”

What caught me was No. 2. By putting “uncle” up high, he outed a huge group of us who are unduly proud of our roles as uncle or aunt, an accomplishment rarely noted by famous people. How many presidents have said, “One of things I’m proudest of is being an uncle”? How many celebrities have claimed that being an aunt or uncle is part of who they are (other than Jake Gyllenhaal)?

In fact, aunt- and uncle-hood classically has been portrayed as a byproduct of suspicious childlessness, as in eccentric Auntie Mame or foppish Uncle Arthur on “Bewitched.” In the conversation about family values, aunts and uncles are rarely mentioned. There are no Happy Aunt’s or Uncle’s Day cards in the Hallmark aisle. It’s not one of those things you put on your Twitter tagline or brag about at office parties. It’s something you go about quietly, without public fanfare.

Yet we live in an era when there are probably more devoted aunts and uncles than ever. There are millions of single, childless gay and straight people and millions of childless gay and straight couples. There are also the billions of aunts and uncles who do have children, but what I’m talking about here is the childless adult who loves the child of her sibling (or sibling-in-law) as though it were her own. The aunt or uncle who takes nieces and nephews to the movies, the ski slopes, the nail salon; who has them over to bake cookies or pizza, who brings armloads of gifts on holidays and birthdays. The one who goes to every boring Little League game, every crummy school musical and every graduation, starting with nursery school.

What I’m talking about is me and my partner. He is the world’s greatest uncle and I am the world’s greatest aunt. We have private and painful reasons for not having children of our own, and if not for our nieces and nephews, and recently a great-nephew, we would have never known the love that only a child can bring to an adult’s life. We would have no hope of someone to tell stories about us to the next generation, to sneak whiskey into the assisted living facility or to sweep the leaves at our grave sites. Until last week, we had no public voice, but now we have someone powerful and famous who has outed us and proudly claimed membership in our club: Uncle Tim Cook.

Tori Ritchie is a San Francisco-based writer and cookbook author. @tuesdayrecipe